This roundup of The Conversation's climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
Author
- Anna Turns
Senior Environment Editor
A close friend of mine escaped her home in the British Virgin Islands during Hurricane Irma in September 2017. She and her young family had to grab their passports and not much else when they fled 200mph winds. At the time, she described the total devastation as "like a bomb going off". Every hurricane season, she and so many other people relive the trauma of that experience. Eight years on, the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica has been particularly terrifying because the storm intensified so rapidly as a result of global warming.
"Once the winds fall silent, anxiety and grief settle in," write psychology researchers Gulnaz Anjum and Mudassar Aziz. "The fear, disconnection and exhaustion that follow a disaster of this scale are not fleeting. They can shape lives for years."
Anjum and Aziz describe how hurricanes like Irma and Melissa can trigger a form of distress known as "deep anticipatory anxiety". Combine that fear of this disaster happening again with the psychological isolation associated with an experience like this, and it's clear that every subsequent storm compounds mental strain. This, they explain, leaves people more vulnerable to lasting emotional distress.
An invisible toll
Aid is often quickly sent to rebuild communities, fix infrastructure and reconnect telecommunications. But the mental health toll is not so tangible. Perhaps that's why it's so often overlooked.
Only as recently as 2022, the UN's climate authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted that climate change poses serious risks to mental wellbeing . And we're not all equally affected.
"Some people and communities are most at risk for increasingly worsening mental health outcomes due to their proximity to the hazard, their reliance on the environment for livelihood and culture and their socioeconomic status," write three Canadian researchers, who study the mental health implications of climate change.
That includes farming communities already experiencing drought and people living in areas most at risk of floods or wildfires.
The bullseye effect?
Collective trauma is currently being felt across the Caribbean and way beyond.
Psychiatry experts at Florida International University in the US, Jonathan S. Comer and Anthony Steven Dick point out that more studies now show that the negative mental health effects of disasters extend far beyond the immediate disaster area .
That goes against the once-dominant theory of disaster mental health, sometimes called the "bullseye model", which proposed that the negative mental health effects of a disaster were directly related to how close the person was to the centre of the event - the bullseye.
When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, they used a national long-term research project that was already underway to study how 11,800 children were coping both before and after the disaster.
"Greater media exposure was associated with higher reporting of post-traumatic stress symptoms - and the link was just as strong in San Diego youth as it was in Florida youth," write Comer and Dick, who advise limiting exposure to social media because "extended exposure to such content rarely provides additional actionable information".
Narratives and neurons
Climate trauma can result "from knowing about or experiencing climate change crises" , according to education researchers at the University of Regina in Canada who point out that young people are particularly susceptible. Focusing on responses to problems can guide people to imagine better futures rather than teaching doomsday clock narratives: "It is more helpful to share concrete examples of community-led climate mitigation, adaptation and financing initiatives," they write.
Trauma from experiencing extreme weather can change the way our brains function. In 2023, Jyoti Mishra, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego, studied how climate change-related trauma affected the memory, attention and ability to process distractions of people who survived the 2018 wildfire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California.
"People who were exposed to the wildfire had greater frontal lobe activity while dealing with distractions," she writes. The frontal lobe is the brain's hub for higher-level functions and frontal brain activity can be a marker for cognitive effort. People exposed to the fires may be having more difficulty processing distractions and compensating by exerting more effort.
Rebuilding resilience
Globally, over a billion people already live with a mental health condition, according to the World Health Organization . Climate catastrophe will "intensify" that, according to researchers at the United Nations University who explain that "mental health support systems should be a fully integrated part of any plan to adapt to climate change and respond to disasters".
Usually, mental health is considered in relation to emergency response and disaster management but support needs to go beyond that, into the long term. That's because psychological wellbeing enables people to withstand adversity and build constructive relationships.
Acting as part of a collective, rather than alone, helps people achieve a sense of agency and solidarity while driving positive change. The researchers also explain that funding for mental health support should also be part of the debate at global climate summits, like the UN's Cop30 climate summit that begins next week in Brazil. That would help transition "from a state of fear and anxiety for many and create hope to build more resilient societies, leaving no one behind and empowering future generations to take climate action".
As Mishra, the psychiatry professor, outlines: "Resilient mental health is what allows us to recover from traumatic experiences. How humans experience and mentally deal with climate catastrophes sets the stage for our future lives."
Don't have time to read about climate change as much as you'd like?
Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation's environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who've subscribed so far.
